Winter 2003, Volume 20.2

Essay

David Stevenson

Untethered in Yosemite: A Report from Paradise in the Last
Summer of the Millennium

David Stevenson (Ph.D., U of Utah) is associate professor
and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Western Illinois University,
where he teaches fiction writing. His essay "One Hundred Years of
American Mountaineering Writing" appeared in the American Alpine
Journal 2002, where he has been an associate editor for many years.

Question asked of Euro-sport
climbers:`Would you ever consider going to Yosemite and trying some
crack classics like Phoenix, Alien, or Cosmic Debris?'A: If it's on our way we might. These
are classics after all, though no good for training purposes. Where is
Yosemite, by the way?
Q:You don't know where Yosemite is?A: Not really. Somewhere in the West.
But where exactly? So far we only looked to see where the hardest routes are
found—none of which are in Yosemite, right?

I do not expect in this lifetime to be bored by Yosemite Valley. Or ever to tire
of driving eastward through the Wawona Tunnel. That first glimpse of El Cap from
the car window has never failed to lift my spirits, to give me an almost
visceral thrill, to humble me. That is why, I suppose, I so admire those who
never leave. I don't believe they stay because they have no other options, no
sense of the larger world outside the Valley, nothing else to which they are so
well-suited. Though all these may also be true, I believe they are secondary to
the certain knowledge that for them Yosemite is unmatched. "This is
it," they say in effect, as Brigham Young is said to have said at the
physical end of a spiritual journey.

Perhaps for its indigenous peoples Yosemite was an Eden, but we can't know
exactly what they thought—Eden being a western concept and the record of mid-
nineteenth century Miwok second-hand and sketchy, at best. In the first writing
about the Valley, Discovery of Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851 Which Led
to That Event, Lafayette Bunnell describes almost simultaneously the holy
beauty of the place and the vanquishing of the first peoples who lived there.
This historical moment is a very precise example of Renato Rosaldo's notion of
"imperialist
nostalgia" as described in Culture and Truth: "the phenomena of
mourning what one has destroyed."

When Yosemite is referred to as edenic today, I think it is often done so
with the design of then disproving the notion. David Robertson, in his
introduction to West of Eden: A History of the Art and Literature of Yosemite,
delineates this point nicely: "The wilderness areas of America are, of
course, quite different from Eden…. Yet our journey to the wilderness may, at
a deep and even partly unconscious level, be a peculiarly American way of
seeking paradise." For the rockclimber, despite recent trends that value
speed and technical difficulty over style and a sense of adventure,
Yosemite remains an unparalleled paradise.

I spent the summer of 1999 on the eastside of the Sierra, in the small
mountain town of Lee Vining just down from Tioga Pass, the east entrance to
Yosemite National Park. In describing the place to those with no concept of
where it might be I always say, "Just east of Yosemite," the way I
might have said Detroit years ago when asked where I was from, when in
truth it was suburbs west of the city. More recently they might say:
"Yosemite, hey! Where that woman got her head chopped off?" Yeah, I
admit. It happened about 30 miles away as the crow flies, but I think by the
time I heard about it they had caught the guy. I felt bad for the victim, of
course, but I also felt that a sacred space, a spiritual refuge, had been
violated. I learned in tenth grade biology class that too many rats in the
terrarium lead to aberrant behavior, or as the Yosemite National Park literature
warns us: the Valley receives 4 million visitors per year, most concentrated in
the two or so square miles of the Valley floor, despite that the park itself
occupies 1,200 square miles of largely undeveloped landscape.

In her book on the American West, Savage Dreams, Rebecca Solnit
re-examines the etymology of the name, Yosemite, finding that it means
probably not "grizzly" as long thought, but "some among them are
killers." Ironically, it was the white settlers who named the place with a
Miwok word, despite that it was also they, the white men, who were the killers.
The Miwok were expelled from their valley homeland of nearly a millennia by the
Mariposa Battalion, Bunnell, the aforementioned writer, among them. Chief Tenaya,
who saw his son brutally murdered by the whites, prophesied and threatened:
"Yes, sir, American, my spirit will make trouble for you and your people,
as you have caused trouble for me and my people." And, indeed there are
some killers in the Valley today. I've always thought stupidity, gravity, and
bad judgment to be the top three, but I suppose we can now add psycho-killer to
the list.

Early in June I'm climbing up the southeast slope—the easy route—of Mt.
Morrison. Morrison is on the eastside of the Sierra—east and south of
Yosemite, just off highway 395. I'm alone—it is, after all, the easy route. A
few miles in and I can feel a blister forming on my heel—probably a large one.

I sit on a rock looking up into the basin below Mt. McAddie—a wild
unvisited place just a few miles from the highway. My foot will be wrecked if I
continue; I'm still at the beginning of a
long day, yet I don't seriously consider turning back.

I just want to be up there. That choice to continue seems significant
somehow, or maybe significant that it didn't even come to being a choice. And
for a while—the rest of the day—I feel untethered.

The climb is not quite so easy as I thought it would be, completely covered
in snow and steep in parts. But it's also shorter than I had imagined, and soon
I'm up there with the whole glorious panorama of the Sierra to myself. I can see
north past Mono Lake toward Reno, east across Nevada, south to dozens and dozens
of giant Sierran peaks whose individuality is subsumed by a sense of totality:
granite, snow, and blue sky forever and ever. I feel giddy; as Emerson had it:
"glad to the brink of fear." I take a lot of photographs knowing as I
snap them off they will bore anyone but me. I write mushy sentimental stuff in
the summit register—words I would surely disown at sea level. And I return,
thinking of those who choose to stay untethered, not for an afternoon, or a
weekend or a summer, but past the point of no return. Out there, up there.

In Yosemite valley at the base of Nutcracker: the line or the queue
as the Aussie kid would have it. He and his partner Tom are just ahead of us.
Ahead of them are two Japanese couples and three guys just starting up—nine in
all; if solitude and wilderness are inextricably linked in our minds, this day
will offer neither. Nutcracker is a moderate Yosemite classic with
historic significance; Royal Robbins put the route up in the sixties without
using any pitons—a revolutionary act at the time. The line of climbers is
expected. Tom has taken off his shirt and spread out his gear on it, immune
apparently to the mosquitoes. In two previous "attempts" on Nutcracker
I've given in to heat and fear in varying proportions. This day the weather is
perfect, the hour not too late. We will wait.

Then the leader of the three person team backs off, is lowered down the wall.
His friend goes up only to take a 30 foot fall which miraculously leaves him
much bloodied and shaken, but otherwise unhurt. For a while this does not deter
them and they plan to re-attack, but soon good judgment prevails and the
bleeding man goes for medical help. They ask would we please retrieve their
gear, left at their high point. Of course. Four of the others start up a
variation and suddenly it's our turn. It has been agreed (but not in spoken
language) that my partner, Jim, would be taking the hard leads. I believe this
intuitive mutual knowledge is based on the fact that I now live in the Midwest,
that my children are young, my waistline expanding—the usual excuses. This day
would mark twenty years since the first time Jim and I roped up together.

The climb is as advertised, a classic; the weather a dream. Even the other
people, the waiting, are not factors that interfere with our pleasure. The crux
moves are hard, as advertised, but soon we are on the summit—having overcome a
surprising stretch of unprotected terrain near the top. The summit block, too,
is a dream with its spectacular views of the Cathedral group to the west and
Half Dome looming above us to the east. Despite that the days's share of four
million visitors drive through the valley, soon to be standing in lines for
cabin reservations, ice cream cones, and t-shirts exhorting "Go Climb a
Rock, and despite that there were numbers of climbers on
the route, we have the summit all to ourselves. You can walk off this one more
or less hassle-free and, all in all, we got what we wanted out of the day,
though it's hard always to say exactly what that is.

As a Forest Service employee on the eastside, I have access to the Yosemite
National Park public news bulletins that are faxed to us daily. I should add
here an important difference between national parks and national forests; parks
are operated basically like museums; they are, in effect, preserved;
forests are operated more like a business with a "multiple use"
mandate. Recreation is one use for the forest, but not the one that pays the
bills: mining, grazing, and logging rights on national forest lands are sources
of millions of dollars of income for the federal government. The budget for
operating the Forests, however, is doled out by Congress and seems to bear no
logical, much less financial, connection to the monies that the Forest takes in.

The first Yosemite news bulletin that catches my eye this summer is about the
BASE jumper who landed safely after leaping off El Cap, ran from waiting,
tipped-off rangers, thumbed his nose at them, and leapt into the raging Merced
River. BASE stands for Buildings, Antennae, Spans, and Earth, the fixed objects
from which these skydivers leap. Robbie Slater, before he was killed descending
from the summit of K2, had done the exact same thing, from the leap off the Big
Stone to the escape into the river. This fellow, however, has not been seen
since, an outlaw, the stuff of legends.

The second news bulletin out of Yosemite announced the rockslide on the
Glacier Point Apron. The Apron is a huge slab of granite that rises from just
south of Curry Village, site of one of the largest concentrations of humanity
within the park. The US Geological Survey estimated the rockfall at about 525
tons. In a strange twist, a climber dies belaying while his friends above him
survived. Accidents of geology seem closest to the hand of God, do they not?
According to the USGS these rocks "have been exposed to weathering for more
than the last one million years." If your number's up, you're number's up,
right?

Yosemite Search and Rescue had a spotting scope set up in the Curry Village
parking lot, watching the cracks in the rock expand, watching geology. I
mention to the spotter that the story as reported in the LA Times didn't
make "climbing sense" to me. "Hey," he said, "whatever
you can say to make the family feel better. Why say anything else?" Then in
response to the question he was doubtless tired of hearing: "Gravity's the
same today as it was yesterday. Rock will fall, but you can't say when."

Late in the afternoon after our little climb of Nutcracker, Jim and I
are wandering around the tourist sites stopping regularly to rehydrate, taking
in the scene. Jim calls his wife and there at the phone booth next to him is Ron
Kauk. Moments earlier I had contemplated purchasing a poster of Kauk on a
climbing route called Peace, rated 5.13c on a scale whose upper-most
limit was 5.9 when originally designed. The route is in northern Yosemite in
Tuolumne Meadows almost six thousand vertical feet above the valley floor. Kauk
had made the first free ascent of Astroman (the east face of Washington
Column) and of Midnight Lightning, the world's most famous
bouldering problem in Camp 4. I had seen him climb in the World Sport Climbing
Championship at Snowbird when I lived in Salt Lake City.

Most of us were there to see the French phenom of the day, Patrick Edlinger,
and I suppose technically speaking he was the best. But when Kauk climbed
there was an electric hushing of the crowd. It might have been that his presence
hadn't been expected, or that, unlike all the rest, he did not wear lycra
tights. It may, too, have been that he was an American. But I think something
else was recognized that day, and it was, again, intangible. It had to do with
fluidity and grace; it had to do with the only real kind of style: acquired by
aspiring to no style—aspiring is not even the right word, a more zen-like
verb is required. What emanated from Kauk had something to do with climbing and
nothing to do with competition. When he popped off near the top of the final
overhang, he had somehow, nonetheless, given us a vision of how it might be
done.

And now here he was talking into a pay phone. And then sitting back down at a
table of friends.

He looks like an ordinary person, except, I suppose, better looking. In any
other American endeavor a person of his stature probably would be sitting in the
leather seats of a BMW, talking on a cellular phone. There can be no doubt that
he pays a high price for his life as he lives it.

That night in Camp 4 we see the Japanese from Nutcracker: filterless
cigarettes all around and two one-gallon bottles of Canadian Club on the picnic
table. Camp 4 is actually now called Sunnyside Walk-in Campground. The name Camp
4 is a remnant of the 1960s—the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing. Mostly
climbers stay here and it's packed with folks—three tents to a site, no
reservations, fourteen day limit. It's hard, on this day impossible, to get a
campsite in midsummer. We're on our way to site 19 where two guys said we could
sleep in their tent while they did the high bivy to get an early start on Snake
Dike, the easiest climbing route on Half Dome. At #19 there are six tents.
We don't even know the guys' names—they were behind us on Nutcracker. A
person appears and directs us to the tent we're looking for. I would be remiss
here if I did not mention that this person was a dwarf.

We then go to site 26 to return the gear left by the guys who fell, then
across the road to the Mountain Room Bar which is devoid of climbers and filled
with people watching the NBA Finals, eyes glued to the two TVs. Here is the
difference I think: these people are tethered to this world. A
couple days later I'm back at work on the eastside thinking about going to the
Tiger Bar down in June Lake to watch a basketball game myself. Alan, a
firefighter who lives a few cabins over, says, "It's the finals?"

"Yep." It's not a comfortable role: Alan's connection to world
news.

"Who's playing?"

I tell him and he looks at me in disbelief. "Shee—oot," he says,
"are we still in Kosovo?" (We were.)

He shakes his head and laughs at himself and/or the larger forgotten world.

The next morning I am up early in Camp 4. A familiar looking man in running
shorts—he looks like a Euro
(What is that look anyway?) but is coming from the Search and Rescue tents. The
muscles in his legs are those of a world-class athlete. Wind and sun- burned.
Hard.

An hour later he's drinking coffee in the lounge and I realize suddenly he's
Werner Braun. About ten years ago he had climbed Astroman over fifty
times. I remember the first time seeing his name and thinking von Braun, the
rocket man. But this man is Braun and the climb is Astroman.

I can't describe Astroman to you very well. It has a climbing pedigree
rarely matched; the first ascent was made by Yosemite climbing pioneers Warren
Harding, Glen Denny, and Chuck Pratt. This was an aid climb, accomplished over a
long period of time: the East Face of Washington Column. All three were
significant figures in the climbing world. During the climb, Steve Roper ferried
water up fixed ropes to the climbers and took photos, published by Harding's
prior arrangement in the Oakland Tribune. This was the first money—thirty
dollars—Roper made from climbing; later he would write the first climbers's
guidebook to Yosemite. This was 1959.

The first free ascent of the same route was made by John Bachar, John Long,
and Ron Kauk in 1975. A free ascent is a climb made in a purer style, no
hanging or resting on gear—hands and feet on rock only. They rechristened it Astroman.
Six luminous visionaries of two generations.

I was telling the story of seeing Werner Braun to young Sean, a first-time
visitor to the Sierra and an accomplished climber, that is, he had done some
hard sport routes at Smith Rock up in Oregon. He didn't know of Braun or Astroman.

"Have you done it?" he asked me, referring to Astroman.

I laughed. "No."

"Are you going to do it?"

"No," I said. And I remembered the day I knew I wouldn't do Astroman
(which would have been any day I had consciously given it any thought). Bob
Schneider and I, Bob who had actually done it years earlier when it was an aid
climb, were talking in the indoor climbing gym. Some climbs recede from you,
others you can keep in sight out there on the horizon. Two guys in their
forties, climbing in a gym. No, we would never do Astroman.

But this concept was lost on the youth Sean to whom everything is still
possible.

I wonder about Werner Braun's count today, if it's even he that keeps count.

In the George Myers and Don Reid guidebook—the most comprehensive of the
guidebooks, listing over 600 routes in the Valley—it says after Astroman,
"This is the free climb." I had always read this to mean that this is the
free climb. But I suppose they wrote that to distinguish it from the aid climb.
In Yosemite Select, a shorter guidebook of only the classics, Reid
says that it is "probably the best free climb in the Valley." And if
it's the best free climb in the Valley, for many it has to be the best in the
world. One imagines Werner saying to himself: It simply can't get any better
than this. Therefore, I will continue to do this route over and over and over….

News bulletin number three: early in June a hiker loses his footing in the
river and is shot over Nevada Falls: a 492 foot drop to the Valley floor. A
multitude
of signs in a wide variety of languages warns against this exact thing. How
could someone do this stupid thing? Could it be that here the Danger the
signs warn us of is so literal, so immediate, and that elsewhere it's not? That
the other warnings cluttering our lives are crying wolf too loudly, too often?
There are warnings and there are warnings, right? This occurrence happens
nearly every summer.

Jim and I drive up to Tuolumne Meadows. The Italians are behind us on a route
called South Crack above Tenaya Lake. Their leader overlaps us at belay
stations, a cheerful fellow singing Neil Diamond songs in Italian. He wishes to
know if Budweiser is the best American beer. Is there any climbing in Chicago?
There's really only one word of English he understands perfectly: runout.
The word refers to expanses of rock which the leader cannot protect and risks a
long and serious fall should he lose his grip or footing. Tuolumne, and South
Crack, are known for runout routes. The Italian sings out randomly, trilling
the r: rrdunout!

I tell Jim about the first time I did South Crack. That time, a man
appears behind me, silently. It's a surprise because usually you can hear the
clanking and tinkling of climbing hardware. He climbs through—passes me. He's
soloing, which is why I haven't heard his gear jangling—he has none. We're
about 400 or 500 feet off the deck. All I can think to say to him is, "How
many times have you done this route?"

"I don't know," he says, "about 200."

Untethered?

At the top Jim and I see a man in a red hat. He's yelling "Down"
and waving wildly. A crazy Euro-tourist, we figure, down his only word of
English. Soloed something in his driving moccasins, no doubt, and now doesn't
know how to get down.

"Down," he yells.

We are above and beyond him by a couple hundred yards, on the long slow road
down—cairns and dirt paths.

When we get back to the car there's the guy in the red hat. He was trying to
show us the fastest way down, he says. We laugh, having thought it was he
who was asking us how to get down.

No, he tells us, he used to guide here. That was the way he took clients
down.

It's a small world, and I suddenly realize to whom we're speaking: "T.
M. Herbert?" I venture.

"Yes," he says.

In Yosemite the Golden Age is recent enough that the gods mingle casually
with mortals, as if they were not gods at all. I know my history.

Herbert, whose son Tommy is a world class rockclimber as well, says he
stopped soloing South Crack the previous year. "Too old," he
says—it's sensible to stop soloing 5.8. Hard to disagree with that.

The Italians in their speedos are lying out on flat rocks on the edge of
Tenaya Lake.

Once at this very spot Kathy Roper sat reading a book at the lakeshore while
her husband Steve and I climbed a short route on the rock above. Dayhikers
paused to watch a bear roam the opposite shore. A tourist remarked to Kathy that
he'd
"seen trout, bears, and idiots," nodding upward in our direction.

I enjoy being in Yosemite with my children. They like to swim, hike, and
climb on the boulders. I see a different Yosemite when I'm with them, and it's a
bit more populated, yes, but it's beautiful, too. My youngest, Macklin, looks
closely at the world, but his gaze is directed to the ground usually: things
that are small, things that crawl, things that are camouflaged. He sees all
these with the eyes of a young animal. But he doesn't often know where he is,
quite, in the larger scheme. "Look up there," I say, Yosemite Falls
just having come into view. He directs his gaze to the sky, and there they are:
the falls.

"Holy crap," he whispers.

Later, Macklin approaches me: "What are you doing?"

"Writing." I am not inviting further inquiry. In fact, writing is
something I almost never attempt when my children are in the house, i.e. all the
time.

"Oh," he says, "is it about me?"

Strange enough that I actually was writing, stranger still that I was, in
fact, writing about him. I read the previous paragraph aloud to him. An
expression of deep concern overcomes him.

"What?" I ask.

"Not good," he says.

I invite further inquiry: "What should I be writing?"

"Say that at Yosemite a UFO came down and took Macklin away. They'll
like that."

Whenever I swim with my children at the Curry Village pool, I can't help take
a few minutes to sit in the shallow end and look north to the Royal Arches,
remembering its classic features: the Pendulum, the long-lost Rotten Log, the
Jungle. Today with large sections of Curry Village fenced off because of the
rockslide danger, I'm looking over my shoulder too, back and up at the Apron,
thinking about gravity, rockfall, luck, geologic time.

But most of the time I'm watching my kids, such that the lifeguard mentions
that he appreciates it that I'm watching them so carefully. I'm glad he's here,
of course, but they're my kids. Somehow we get on the topic of the BASE
jumper. It's the lifeguard's opinion that his body completely disintegrated in
the Merced, thrashed to atoms against the rocks and logs at peak run-off. I
hadn't considered that—I had thought he simply escaped. If the truth is in
between, he's drowned, his body wedged in some lonely high-water place. Of
course that's it, I think. Still, I much prefer my version.

Later in the summer I am at Mirror Lake with my family: wife and two boys six
and eight years old. The hike to Mirror Lake is short; the trail is paved, and
you can take a bus—for free—halfway there from Curry Village. Hence there
are lots of people at Mirror Lake: families abound, frat boys at a bachelor
party, folks on rented mountain bikes. This is the farthest east in the Valley
I've ever been, and here below Half Dome the approach to the climbing routes on
the northwest face looks as unappealing as I've always heard it to be: loose and
dirty rock, steep, slabby, long, etc. Suddenly two guys with mega-loaded packs—a
battered white FISH pack among them—appear. They unweight their loads slowly—as
one must shed 100 plus pounds of stuff—and sit on the sand.
They begin to take their shoes off to cross the river—there's a slow motion
aspect to their actions.

I'm wondering why they'd be coming down this way—the standard descent off
the top is a walk-off down the trail. So I ask.

"A traverse," they say, "we've done a traverse." Nine
days on the wall, 12 nights total. Plus another trip up to retrieve gear. They
ask if I climb.

I'm hesitant to say yes, because compared to them I'm really just fooling
around. I say, "Yes," but so they don't get the wrong idea, add that
I've never slept on a porta-ledge.

They look better than I'd feel if I were them, although their hands look
hammered—swollen like sausages is the standard climber's cliche. I mention
that, but they seem to notice. Later my wife would say they had a look on their
face that she couldn't quite describe. I recognized it, though.

Later, on the hike down, I catch up to them and we talk climbing. At first I
feel like I'm intruding on private space, mythic ritual: the end of the hike
out, the return to the world. We talk about the ice climbing in Lee Vining, the American
Alpine Journal, the Bugaboos. My son Macklin is delighted with Jay's advice:
if we go to the Bugaboos, be sure to cover the tires and hoses of the car with
chicken wire so the porcupines won't eat them, exactly the kind of advice a
six-year-old expects will be helpful in this world. Without gushing, I try to
express the enormity of my admiration for what they've just done. Only very late
in the conversation did they admit it was a first ascent. A superb achievement—but
the world that understands it for what it is, the world that appreciates it, is
very small. All too soon their climb will become (for everyone but them) a line
on a photograph, a few words on a page. I ask if they've named it, but no, they
haven't got around to that yet.

Later still, I'll realize that I had met Jay before (I'll also remember that,
in another life, I had slept on a porta-ledge—bad memory being one of the
necessaries of continuing to climb). I see Jay at the store sitting at a picnic
table, a point of stillness among the blur of tourist activity. You might say he
was in a daze. But, as I've said, I know the look—seen it in the mirror. He's
been untethered and now he's in between. Exhaustion, contentedness, stillness,
at peace, spaced, happy to be alive, to be unburdened of the pack, to be sitting
down on a bench, happy to be holding a bottle of beer, the beady coolness of the
glass against one's hand, too tired to remember to drink of it.

Could it be that all visitors to the Valley since (and including) Lafayette
Bunnell have been seeking the same thing? The climbers, the tourists, the BASE
jumpers, the people watching television in the Mountain Room Bar, the Europeans
in their speedos? David Robertson has speculated, "Perhaps what we seek
most in the wilderness is a return to a new and different Eden." Of course,
Yosemite's status as wilderness is much in doubt, since the concept insists that
a place be both relatively uninhabited and undeveloped. A small area that
receives four million visitors a year cannot really be wilderness. Despite that
some of the climbing routes are crowded, in my experience it has always been
possible to
get away from "it all." I have sat on ledges just a few hundred feet
off the Valley floor as the sun sets and watched its golden light pour through
the mouth of the valley, illuminating the granite walls and spires and glinting
off the Merced as if it were a river of mercury. Though I know there are
thousands of people below me, they are unseen, swallowed up by the canopy of
black oak and lodgepole pine that covers even most of the buildings and roads.
And, somehow—it seems miraculous—there is silence. Something happens. It may
be that I have found, as Robertson says, "a natural regeneration and mental
and spiritual well-being." But there's something about those words, that
language, that I distrust, as if they were not descriptors of experience but a
kind of betrayal of it. I'm not sure that language can ever describe this
feeling very well, and maybe that too is why I'll keep returning year after year
to Yosemite, still a paradise, as the third millennium begins.

Afterword

Cary Stayner is serving a life sentence for the murder mentioned early in
this essay. He awaits trial for the murder of three other women, also in
Yosemite National Park earlier in 1999.

The body of BASE jumper Frank Gambalie III was found pinned beneath a rock in
the Merced River 28 days after he was last seen leaping into it. His friend Adam
Filipino commented, " They had a freaking serial killer living in Yosemite
right under their noses and federal agents were chasing BASE jumpers to their
deaths." It is estimated that about 100 jumpers a year leap from El Cap, a
Class B
misdemeanor that carries a maximum $5,000 fine and six months in jail, and, in
most cases, confiscation of the jumper's gear.

Sunnyside Campground, which had been scheduled for demolition to make way for
employee housing has been "saved" largely through write-in efforts by
climbers from around the world. National Park Service Region Director John
Reynolds said, "When I heard from climbers from over 30 countries that they
hold three places sacred, Everest Basecamp, Chamonix, and Yosemite, I knew we
couldn't treat Yosemite like any other climbing area. I knew it was
special." Current plans are to revert the campground to its original Camp 4
name, and it is being considered for designation as a National Historical Site.

Current climbing trends in Yosemite tend toward speed ascents. Among them are
Hans Florine's solo climbs of both Half Dome and El Cap in a single day.
Florine's climb on Half Dome was accomplished in three hours and twenty-five
minutes. These are, of course, mind-boggling achievements. But the element of
the "unknown" has been reduced, such that the only mystery seems to be
how fast a route can be climbed. As Peter Croft, the first person to free
(no-rope!) solo Astroman has said, "—Speed climbing by itself can
be a bit of a dead end. It often focuses more on one-up-manships than on
mind-expanding grand tours."

Ron Kauk was stunt double for Tom Cruise in the climbing scene that opens Mission
Impossible 2. Undoubtedly the director had to take great care because Kauk
looks so much more like a movie star than does Cruise.

Recently the National Park Service
put forward a 386 million dollar plan to, among other things, reduce Valley
traffic by building a huge parking lot just west of the Park. The Sierra Club is
opposed, claiming that no development has ever been good for the Park.

Jay Smith and Karl McConachie's route on Half Dome was eventually named Peripheral
Vision and was the first complete traverse of the northwest face. It
involved 18 full-length rope-lengths of "new ground." In his formal
account in the American Alpine Journal, Smith called the climb
"truly outstanding," adding, "This is a grand tour, especially if
you want to see all the routes on the Dome."

Acknowledgments

I am more indebted than my essay might imply to the three books mentioned in
the text: David Robertson's West of Eden, which makes clear that art
always describes a history and shapes a future; Steve Roper's Camp 4,
which expertly shows how the personal and the historical might be honestly
balanced; and Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams: a Journey into the Landscape
Wars of the American West, for its quirky and unflinching historical
research. I am also indebted to Scott Slovic's essay "`Be Prepared for the
Worst': Love, Anticipated Loss, and Environmental Valuation" in Western
American Literature, Fall 2000, for directing me to Renato Rosaldo's concept
of "imperialist nostalgia."